The French give up wine - Sacre Bleu!

Word comes this week that the French are no longer drinking wine. Mon Dieu! What is the world coming to?  Apparently this decline has been going on for years. Those delicious bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon or Bordeaux are disappearing from their dinner tables. In 1980 over 50% of French adults consumed the crushed grape daily - now it's just 17%. By my reckoning that's eight out of ten of our Gallic brethren don't imbibe.

Now, I love the stuff. Rarely seen without it, but there's more.

Denis Saverot, editor of La Revue des Vins de France magazine, says it's the working class who made it popular in the first place. He blames the war.

"Basically the soldiers went over the top pickled on pinard, the strong, low-quality wine which was supplied in bulk. Up until then the Normans, the Bretons, the people of Picardy and the north, they had never touched wine. But they learned in the trenches. By the 1950s there were drinking outlets, cafes and bars, everywhere. Tiny villages would have five or six."

Sounds fine to me. So, where did it all go wrong?  Denis continues.

"It is our bourgeois, technocratic elite with their campaigns against drink-driving and alcoholism, lumping wine in with every other type of alcohol, even though it should be regarded as totally different," he says.

"Recently I heard one senior health official saying that wine causes cancer 'from the very first glass'. That coming from a Frenchman. Our elites prefer to keep the country on chemical anti-depressants and wean us off wine. In the 1960s, we were drinking 160 litres each a year and weren't taking any pills. Today we consume 80 million packets of anti-depressants, and wine sales are collapsing."

He ends. "The village bar has gone, replaced by a pharmacy."

Denis has got a point worth us Anglais taking on board. Traditionally we use beer and pubs in the same way - to socialise. We always have. Got a problem? Have a beer and a chuckle with friends. That's the difference between a round of drinks and anti-depressants. Communal pill popping never solved anything. We later added wine, French originally and now universally available, to our hospitality. Are we also to go the way of those across the Mer?

Oxford-based French writer Theodore Zeldin has the last word, and this might sound familiar.

"A business-style culture has made huge inroads into France - the bane of all those who prefer to take the time to savour things. Companionship has been replaced by networking. Business means busy-ness. The old French art de vivre is still there. It's an ideal. Of course times have changed, but it still survives. We have a duty to entertain, to converse. And in France - thanks to our education system - we still have that ability to converse in a general, universalist way that has been lost elsewhere. "

"That is the art de vivre. It is about taking your time. And wine is part of it, because with wine you have to take your time. After all, that is one of the great things about wine. You can't swig it."

Order me a glass of Bordeaux immediately - and send my psychiatrist packing.

The Sharksucker

Sharksucker fish

The Natural History Museum has released this fascinating picture of  the genus Remora or Sharksucker fish which uses the unique sucking disc on its head to attach itself to large marine animals such as sharks or turtles. There has long been legends of a fish that sticks to sailing ships and has powers to slow them down. Now scientists have shown that this fish developed a modified dorsal fin just for this use.

One wonders if mammals also developed along these specialist lines. One, perhaps evolved into the Bankersucker which attaches itself to customers accounts thus drawing off sustenance to convert into yachts and bonuses.

Or the Benefitsucker that seeks out taxpayers, particularly targeting daft councillors with empty five bedroom houses?

Or the MPsucker, a particularly brazen species that spots empty flats near the Houses of Parliament and attaches them to Commons expenses forms.

David Attenborough should be alerted. There's a series here for next Christmas.

Nature's fierce laws of survival

The Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year award winners are on view now at the Natural History Museum. Always a stunning show there are 100 wonderful prize winners to see there in December. I've posted some already, but this one by French wildlife cameraman, Gregoire Bouguereau, captured my attention. Read Gregoire's explanation to experience Nature's fierce laws of survival.

Practice run

When a female cheetah caught but didn’t kill a Thomson’s gazelle calf and waited for her cubs to join her, Grégoire guessed what was about to happen. He’d spent nearly a decade studying and photographing cheetahs in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, and he knew that the female’s behaviour meant one thing: a hunting lesson was due to begin. The female moved away, leaving the calf lying on the ground near her cubs. At first, the cubs took no notice of it. But when it struggled jerkily to its feet ‘the cubs’ natural predatory instincts were triggered,’ says Grégoire. ‘Each cub’s gaze locked on to the calf as it made a break for freedom.’ The lesson repeated itself several times, with the cubs ignoring the calf when it was on the ground and catching it whenever it tried to escape – ‘an exercise that affords the cubs the chance to practise chases in preparation for the time they’ll have to do so for real.’

Gregoire won the 2012:Behavior: Mammals Award. 

IPA Wildlife Awards

Browsing through the annual International Photography Awards is always a pleasure. Now in its 10th year this must be the most comprehensive competition in the industry with over 61 Pro categories and a similar amount for Non-Pros & Students.  To date the IPA have paid out over $175,000 in prizes.

This year I was struck by the entry of Netherlands wildlife photographer Marsel van Oosten whose wildlife work is familiar to National Geographic readers. Marsel and his partner Daniella Sibbing run wildlife workshops all over the world for their students.

His entry is titled "Close Encounters."

It's not hard to see why. Without Marsel's courage I'd be inclined to call it "Run Like Hell!"

 

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

It's the photographic awards season again. My favourite time of year. Leading off is the brilliant Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide.

From an entry of thousands they whittle it down to 52 superb commended images who then vie for the title. The winners are announced on October 17th and the exhibition opens to the public two days later at the Museum. Well worth a visit. Here is just a taste of it:

The Medusa Emerald

The Medusa emerald

The Medusa Emerald is one of the world’s finest mineral specimens, having been hidden for millions of years in a huge bolder of quartz. The Natural History Museum in London now has it on display, the first time in Europe, and it's a unique Emerald. It is unusually large with high clarity and intense, strong colouring and is more like eight Emerald sticks protruding from a bed of quartz rock.

Its owners, Gemfields, used state-of-the-art techniques to reveal it, millimetre by millimetre, cutting it from the rock to reveal the beautiful emerald crystals within, a labour that took several months by the world's specialists.

Writing The Emerald Killers began my fascination with emeralds.  I used the notorious Boyaca Emerald Valley in Colombia as a backdrop for my thriller about the illegal trade in emeralds there. I also discovered that the green gemstones should not exist at all. A quirk of nature millennia ago brought chromium and vanadium from another continent across the world, trapped in the earth’s moving tectonic plates, to fuse with clear beryllium, creating the lustre of the intense green colouring.

Emerald is twenty times more rare than diamond and sells at the same price per carat. Its specific gravity being low any emerald is larger per carat than other gems. If you hold an emerald to the sun you will see its fine ‘garden of inclusions,’ a tracery of tiny chambers trapping the gases of its creation within it. These do not detract from the price.

These ‘inclusions’ are sealed with palm or cedar wood oil before it’s sold. In my book they are smuggled out of Colombia to New York and legitimised into the gem trade.

The Medusa is on display at the Natural History Museum for 12 months.

Seb Coe and the perfect shot

There is a brilliant spread in the Daily Mail today depicting Seb Coe re-enacting his historic Olympic win in the Moscow Olympics. It's by photographer Igor Monichev but the original next to it, taken 32 years ago, was an example of the job the great staff photographers of that era did. The by-line was Monty Fresco.

I was on the Daily Mail and the incomparable Monty Fresco was our cameraman trackside. His name was on the original picture - twice in half an hour. Monty was a legend, a man with boundless energy, unlimited courage and an artist renowned for going to any lengths to get a news picture. He once hired a red, double-decker and drove it to the Thai Embassy because he heard that the King and Queen of Thailand loved London buses. Sure enough, they came out, fascinated by it and wanted a ride. The security men couldn't throw Monty off it because he had hired it, it was his bus - and he drove them sightseeing around London all afternoon - and the Daily Mail got an exclusive.

Back at the Olympic trackside, 50 snappers got Seb Coe's astonished look as he broke the tape in the 1500 metres. Within minutes Monty and the other cameramen had their version of the win on the wires to their London newspaper offices. Each snap was slightly different, an arm up or down. Nobody had that crucifixion, arms wide shot. Calls were made, some snappers blaspheming down the line at London's demand for perfection, didn't we know 'our man' had won!

Not Monty. He hunted down every snapper on the finish line, asking to scrutinise their negatives until he found the perfect shot from an East european photographer. Within half an hour it was back over the wires and onto the Daily Mail front page - with Monty's by-line on it, of course! Monty was the absolute perfect professional.